WordPress - A content editor's comfort food.

This CMS is every content editor's and infrequent bloggers best friend. Super easy to use, extremely intuitive and has a friendly coolness to it.

WordPress is an open source, PHP-based CMS and with that comes the flexibility that allows developers to create any manner of complex features or functions - so while it has this easy-to-use exterior, inside it is the little engine that rocks!

Its pros and cons are all wrapped up in the plug ins. Tons and tons (literally thousands) are available; there are plugins to do whatever you want. But there's the rub, the plugin needs to be maintained, and sometime it's not - which leads to upgrade issues. If the CMS is upgraded frequently and consistently it performs like a champ - but this is a little bit of high maintenance CMS.

We've designed and built a number of WordPress websites for institutions of higher education, nonprofits, associations, and businesses, and some of them utilize our Webmaster Service maintenance to help maintain their websites.

Radiation Ready

The Challenge

The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and The National Alliance for Radiation Readiness (NARR) sought a technology partner to develop a web-based clearinghouse for radiological preparedness tools and resources. The site needed to be able to house numerous varieties of resources, including these: response plans, documents describing best practices / lessons learned, talking points, toolkits, training modules, and other relevant forms and templates that may be of use to the public health and healthcare practice community. In addition, ASTHO needed a vendor to design a logo for NARR before designing and building the website itself. The entire project needed to be completed within a span of four months on a limited budget.

The Solution

Hodgson began the project by meeting with ASTHO and NARR personnel and stakeholders to establish the specific design goals for the project. Hodgson’s creative team developed a logo for NARR and also established color palettes and style sheets for the new website. The designs for the logo and the web-based clearinghouse were refined based on an iterative process of presentations and revisions that included feedback from ASTHO and NARR stakeholders.

Hodgson recommended WordPress as the ideal CMS for the NARR clearinghouse because of its simple yet effective content management functionality. Hodgson designed and built a WordPress site that fulfills all of the following roles:

A searchable repository of online documents in multiple formats on which users can provide feedback

A portal for users to submit documents and for administrators to review and approve / reject submissions

A real-time emergency response resource that can be easily updated in times of crisis

2015 Redesign

In 2015, Hodgson’s creative team and WordPress developers completed a design refresh of the NARR site to bring the site’s design and functionality in line with modern web standards, including responsive design.

About NARR and ASTHO

The National Alliance for Radiation Readiness (NARR) is a coalition of public health and healthcare organizations dedicated to radiological preparedness. It is funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Environmental Health, and it is led by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO). ASTHO is a nonprofit 501 (c)(3), the membership of which consists of the chief Health Officials representing the states and territories of the United States.

NARR's mission is to enhance radiological preparedness capability and capacity in public health and health care systems through a coalition of organizations committed to improving the nation’s ability to prepare, respond, and recover from radiological emergencies at the local, state, and national levels.

Goodwin House

The Challenge

Goodwin House, Inc. was in need of an experienced web technology vendor to redesign their website (www.goodwinhouse.org) in order to make it a more effective vehicle for promotion of their wide array of offered services and the high quality, active lifestyle experience by their residents.

Goodwin House staff felt that their original website was not warm or inviting, featuring instead a text-heavy, outdated look and feel. The original site also had a difficult navigation structure and lacked accessibility features. In addition, it did not offer the online donation or contact form functionality that the staff needed.

The Solution

In order to offer Goodwin House an online home that would serve the needs of staff and residents while promoting their services to prospective residents, Hodgson redesigned and rebuilt the website on the WordPress platform, thereby allowing Goodwin House staff a user friendly means of controlling content and serving key audiences. WordPress is particularly straightforward and intuitive as a content management system, and it was selected precisely because it would allow non-technical Goodwin House staff to edit content without difficulty.

Hodgson’s creative team designed the new site to reflect the established branding guidelines of the organization. The goal was to build a site that was vibrant, engaging, innovative, and warm. The site which resulted from this redesign process is easier for staff to maintain and update; it offers highly accessible information about the multiple Goodwin House locations and associated amenities; and it serves as an effective sales and marketing tool for attracting new residents.

Goodwin House’s new online home includes a number of desirable features aimed at making it an informative, user-friendly web destination: text resizing options for improved accessibility; secure online donations; an online events calendar; an online tool for calculating the value of living at Goodwin House; a virtual tour section for prospective residents; site search functionality; and different, community-oriented content for each of the Goodwin House locations and the Goodwin House Foundation.

About Goodwin House

Goodwin House Incorporated is a nonprofit, non-stock Virginia corporation organized in 1955 by resolution of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Virginia. The GHI family owns and operates two continuing care retirement communities—Goodwin House Alexandria and Goodwin House Bailey’s Crossroads, includes Goodwin House Foundation, and is management agent for The Lewinsville Retirement Residences, Inc.

Presbyterian College

The Challenge

Presbyterian College (www.presby.edu) sought a vendor to assist them with the design and construction of a website that communicates a unified marketing image. The objective was to develop a visually attractive, highly effective and functional user-friendly site with the ability for Presbyterian College staff to manage and maintain the website.

PC’s chosen web partner would need to present the new designs in a way that the branding, creative ideas, and final creative work are identifiably distinctive, accurately portraying the mission and position of PC, and uniquely conveying a consistent meaning and value to prospective students and their family members. The primary message to communicate through the website was that PC offers challenging academics with a personal touch. The look of the new site was to be academic with a casual, down-to-earth feel.

The Solution

In order to provide Presbyterian College with a site that met their marketing, usability, and content management goals, Hodgson recommended the highly user friendly WordPress CMS as the ideal platform for PC’s website. We began the project with several days of comprehensive web strategy and functional requirements meetings with PC staff from numerous departments and constituencies within the College.

With a cohesive strategy in hand, Hodgson’s creative team developed wireframes for the site and then mocked up a fresh look and feel for the PC site. When designs were approved, we built out HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using responsive web design (RWD) techniques. These templates were handed over to our WordPress development team, who implemented the multisite management version of WordPress. The benefit of this approach is that each separate department within the college is able to control their own content without needing to navigate through portions of the site irrelevant to their particular goals.

During the project, Hodgson implemented a campus directory search and worked with the Google Calendar API to customize the PC events calendar. When the site had been tested and approved for launch, Hodgson’s technical writing staff produced a WordPress training manual to guide PC content editors and administrators as they maintained the site.

About Presbyterian College

Presbyterian College (PC) is located on a beautiful 240-acre campus between Columbia and Greenville in South Carolina. With small classes and faculty who want the best for their students, their supportive community provides more than an exceptional liberal arts education. PC empowers students to be servant leaders in their communities through challenging academics and a culture of honor and ethics.

Since 1880, PC has been personally committed to success. As a result, 90 percent of their students are in graduate programs or have secured jobs within six months of graduation.

Oceus Networks

The Challenge

The original Oceus Networks website was a text-heavy site built on the Drupal platform. The Oceus marketing team had a difficult time managing content because the Drupal administrative interface was not particularly user-friendly and intuitive.

The previous Oceus website also had a significant amount of superfluous functionality that distracted from the company’s core marketing message. For example, the old site’s e-commerce features were not particularly useful, because Oceus is primarily a Department of Defense contractor. The federal procurement process does not allow for e-commerce transactions; items must be purchased through GSA schedules.

The Solution

Hodgson was contracted to design and build a modern-looking site with trimmed down content. This would allow Oceus to focus on promotion of their core products: ONmission, an end-to-end network management system for battlefield and emergency response situations; and Xiphos, a field-deployable 4G LTE tactical broadband solution.

To meet the goals above, we created a look and feel that represents a marriage of conservative DoD culture (black background in the header and chill blue) with a fresh, modern design (wide banner area with strong mission statement up front). The “top secret” nature of Oceus’s customer base and mission combined with a product that is not exciting to look at (essentially a field LTE network generator) made getting imagery for the site quite challenging.

Our creative team took photographs of the Oceus products (while turned off, to preserve security) and overlaid those images with visuals on device screen and background elements to show the products “in action.” We used abstract background images to add a sense of movement to the images.

When the design was approved, we built responsive HTML and CSS to ensure that the site would provide an excellent user experience regardless of device. Our development team implemented the new design into WordPress, which provides content management features that are simpler and more intuitive than the complex features of Drupal.

About Oceus Networks

Oceus Networks specializes in broadband and wireless communications solutions leveraging the latest in Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) technologies allowing them to deliver the highest value products and solutions at a reduced cost.

Their reliable and proven solutions support critical missions around the world. They deploy high-bandwidth, next generation wireless systems into austere tactical environments, first responder environments, enterprise systems for large user implementations, and discrete lab systems.

ABAM

The Challenge

The American Board of Addiction Medicine (ABAM) approached Hodgson in 2009 seeking a website redesign and WordPress implementation. The association had a list of functionality that was critical to the new website, including a searchable directory and results page, Google site search, ecommerce and a contact us form.

The Solution

Hodgson took ABAM through the proven five-step web development process. The website was developed in WordPress, and Hodgson’s developers ensured the required functionality was part of the finished project.

As the website grew in size and complexity, ABAM found themselves requiring ongoing assistance. Through a long-term Webmaster Services contract, Hodgson has been able to provide a full team of web development specialists to ABAM. Tasks have included, among many others, WordPress upgrades, the development of microsites, and a domain name change that had to be incorporated throughout the front and back ends of the website.

Hodgson maintains the ABAM site under a Webmaster Services contract to this day.

About The American Board of Addiction Medicine (ABAM)

ABAM is the nation’s first medical specialty board that certifies addiction medicine physicians across a range of medical specialties. The board sets standards for physician education, assesses physicians’ knowledge and requires and tracks life-long education. It is an independent specialty board established in 2007.